Top of the Great Era

Hearing that Boss Zhou clearly stated his aspirations, Paul Yanoval cheered up. This is to completely change Fandango's product positioning and business philosophy from a strategic level.

Then comes the third point.

Paul went on to say: "There is also culture and habits. The average American buys four movie tickets every year. Many elderly people are used to going to offline movie theaters to buy tickets, and buy some Coke and popcorn by the way. "

Zhou Buqi has realized this for a long time, "Almost, let's start with the younger generation first. Well, the Internet is originally more biased towards young people."

Seeing that the big boss had such a good attitude, Paul was relieved, and said with a smile: "Fortunately, the proportion of teenagers in the United States is relatively high, exceeding 40%. This is the largest age group. If you can change the ticket buying habits of these people, then After ten or 20 years of training, two or three generations down, many traditional concepts can be changed."

Zhou Buqi nodded, "Just like Netflix."

Netflix is ​​an Internet product, so now Netflix users are mainly young people, and the main platform for middle-aged and elderly people to watch dramas is still TV stations.

But as time goes on, TV stations will become more and more marginalized.

Including ace channels like HBO.

With the decline of the TV business, they can only transform to online streaming media.

Extend the timeline, and streaming media will become more and more popular.

Paul said: "For Fandango, the most important thing now is how to attract the attention of young people as soon as possible, and then change their past habits and let them buy movie tickets on Fandango's platform."

Zhou Buqi looked at him with a smile, "Do you have any suggestions?"

"It's hard." Paul sighed, feeling a little embarrassed, "If you only rely on price discounts and subsidies to attract people, I'm afraid it won't be a long-term solution. Groupon was also popular a few years ago and even went public. .It is no longer possible, the performance is too sluggish, and it has recently been announced that it will lay off 10% of its staff.”

Groupon is the "grandfather" of group buying websites.

One of the most important strategies to develop so fast in the United States is subsidies.In addition to various coupons given by merchants, the platform will also provide subsidies.

Then he quickly accumulated fame among young people.

The scale of users is increasing, and the turnover is getting higher and higher.

Then it went public.

But after going public, you can't be too willful. You have to be responsible for shareholders and create profits.To create profits, it is necessary to reduce the intensity of subsidies.Once the subsidy is reduced, user activity will decrease, turnover will decline, performance will deteriorate, and stock prices will plummet.

This is also the reason why the US Internet industry is very afraid of the O2O subsidy model.

Not only did this model lead to great tragedy during the bubble crisis around 2000, but in the new era, the O2O concept of Groupon has also become a negative teaching material.

In fact, not only the United States.

Many similar industrial Internet O2O platforms in China will also encounter this dilemma.

Subsidized, very popular.

When the subsidy is stopped, the business is cold.

The most typical example is the group buying in the community. When the wind blows, capital rushes in crazily, and each one is richer than the other, and they are all burning money crazily to grab the market.

When the heat subsides and the momentum of capital influx decreases, many companies will no longer have enough money in their accounts to afford high subsidies, so they will die.

Zhou Buqi was also troubled by this.

He really couldn't find a good solution, so Ziweixing intervened in the form of investment in Internet businesses such as group buying, shared bicycles, and online car-hailing.

Let them operate independently.

Whoever can do it well will do it, and if he can't do it well, he will fail.

However, there is one industry that can still maintain a long-term subsidy system, and that is the ticketing platform for movie tickets.

One very important reason is that the film box office market is relatively small, and the film industry is the leader in the entertainment industry, and the entertainment industry is often at the forefront of traffic.

On the surface, the platform is subsidizing movie tickets to users.

In fact, the platform is spending money to buy focus and traffic.

If you do cost accounting from the perspective of buying traffic, and buy traffic by subsidizing movie tickets, the price is really too low, and it's really a bargain.

Paul Yanoval is unavoidably worried that if the company changes Fandango's business philosophy and implements a subsidy system... I am afraid that this policy will be difficult to maintain for too long.

After all, the standpoints are different, and the perspectives to see the problem are also different.

Paul is worried that Fandango will suffer losses for years without making any money.

But Zhou Buqi just wants to use Fandango as a traffic introduction tool.

After doing a lot of research, Zhou Buqi already has a preliminary understanding of the concept of movie ticketing.However, this is not enough.Then we all went to a newly renovated movie theater nearby.

There are several new devices here - movie ticket self-service vending machines.

Because movie tickets are bought offline in the United States, there are often long queues in movie theaters to buy tickets.Especially when attractive Hollywood blockbusters are released, it is really crowded and hard to find a ticket.

Self-service vending machines can solve this demand to a certain extent.

The manager of the cinema is called Recole, and he made some detailed explanations, "In fact, such a machine appeared as early as ten years ago. It was launched for a while, but the effect was very poor. And because of the inconsistent data coordination , There are often mistakes, and several windows sell movie tickets for one seat at the same time."

Zhou Buqi nodded, "Can this machine solve the problem?"

Recole said with a smile: "Yes, this is a new self-service vending machine launched by Coinstar. It uses the latest technology and can be connected to the Internet in real time. It uses a lot of sophisticated equipment."

Seeing that Boss Zhou was a little confused, Paul Yanoval explained, "There are two major self-service vending machine companies in the United States, one is Coinstar and the other is NCR. However, the self-service sale of movie tickets is a new business. They In the past, the main business was DVD self-service rental and vending machines.”

Zhou Buqi understood now, "The DVD market is getting cold, so they turned around and started selling movie tickets by themselves."

Paul said: "It should be like this. In order to transform, NCR sold all its DVD self-service rental machine business and product lines to Coinstar. I believe they are also developing their own movie ticket vending machines."

Zhou Buqi nodded, and then asked the theater owner Recole, "This machine can sell movie tickets, but what about the payment process? What should I do?"

Lei Ke said: "There is a membership card."

"What?"

Zhou Buqi was slightly taken aback.

Recole said with a smile: "We are a theater chain. There are 12 theaters in the Los Angeles area, and we have our own membership card. The membership card can be recharged. Fans hold the membership card here... Yes, put the card in the Once you swipe here, you can deduct the fee. Once the fee is deducted successfully, you can issue a ticket.”

As he said that, he asked his assistant to come over and demonstrate it to Boss Zhou.

Although the two had no friendship or business contacts in the past, the appearance of Boss Zhou was a great glory in itself, and of course he had to show it more.

The assistant first clicked a few times on the screen of the self-service ticket vending machine, selected "The Avengers", selected a hall, and then entered the seat selection process.

That's right, through this self-service ticket vending machine, you can choose your own seat in real time.

Sit wherever you want.

Zhou Buqi turned his head and looked at Paul.

Next, the assistant continued to demonstrate. After the votes and seats were selected, it entered the payment link.The assistant took out a black membership card and put it in the card swiping place.

Only a sound of "Ding" is heard, indicating that the card swiping is successful.

Then I heard the sound of "buzzing" from the machine, and after a while, a movie ticket for "The Avengers" came out of the ticket outlet.

Recole was very proud, "It's very simple, isn't it?"

Zhou Buqi smiled and didn't say much.

It is too troublesome to apply for a membership card and recharge the card.

There are at least a hundred movie theaters in Los Angeles.

If every family had a membership card, would movie fans still want to watch movies?

Recole continued on his own: "Actually, there is another payment mode."

Zhou Buqi asked, "How?"

Recole said with a smile: "Everyone is using smartphones now, especially young people. In order to take care of movie fans more conveniently and allow them to buy tickets more conveniently, the company will specially develop an app for our company. Twelve theaters throughout Los Angeles are included, no membership card required, and online payments can be made using the App."

Zhou Buqi laughed, "Then can I vote online and select seats online?"

Recole was slightly taken aback, "What's online?"

Paul added, "It is to vote and select seats on the app on the mobile phone, so you don't need to operate on this machine. That will be more convenient."

"This..." The words seemed to be beyond Lei Keer's comprehension, he hesitated for a while, "Should it be possible?"

After leaving, Zhou Buqi asked Paul, "Do you think it is possible? Their app can select seats online?"

Paul shook his head, "I don't think so."

Zhou Buqi said: "Well, it is limited by geographical conditions."

Paul said: "Indeed, if you come to the movie theater to choose seats, even if you don't have the best seats, but if you come here, you can barely choose some not-so-good seats. But if you are not in the movie theater, you will find The best seats are all gone, and they may not even come. This should be a strategy for many movie theaters to attract audiences."

Zhou Buqi snorted, "It's nothing more than relying on an undisclosed and opaque mechanism to defraud consumers."

Paul laughed.

Not much to say.

A lot of things in the film industry are inherently excessive.

If you go to the mall to buy a piece of clothing, you can return it within seven days without any reason if you don’t like it; if you buy a piece of food and find that the food has gone bad, you can also get your money back.But movies are not good, as long as you spend money to buy a ticket, even if you don’t go to see it, the movie ticket will not be refunded; as long as you spend money to buy a ticket, even if the movie is bad or ugly, the money will not be refunded.